Silent Scream: Anguish Grows in the Terror War's Forgotten Victim

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Portion below; whole thing here: http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php

With each passing week, anguish and atrocity are deepening in Somalia, the third "regime change" target of George Bush's Terror War. Thousands of innocent people have been killed and a million have been driven from their homes by an Ethiopian invasion backed, funded and armed by the Bush Administration, which has also intervened directly with air strikes, naval shelling, renditions of fleeing refugees (including U.S. citizens) to Ethiopia's notorious prisons and, on at least one occasion, with a U.S. death squad sent in after an airstrike with orders to "kill anyone left alive."

This week, both the International Red Cross and UN officials issued dire assessments of the "dramatically" deteriorating situation. Hundreds of thousands of refugees are surviving on "something less than one meal a day," the Red Cross reports. Food and water shortages are now "life-threatening" in several regions across the country. Violent conflict with insurgents – and brutal "counterinsurgency" measures by the Ethiopian invaders and the "transitional government" – are intensifying, sending thousands more fleeing into the already stripped and overburdened countryside. Hospitals in the capital of Mogadishu are overflowing with wounded civilians, while there is little or no treatment for multitudes in other regions, where conflict and disease are spreading rapidly. Six humanitarian workers have been killed in Somalia in this year alone; only 2,000 are working there now –while there are 12,000 in Darfur, as Reuters notes. "I truly believe this is the worst humanitarian crisis on the continent, possibly in the world," says Phillipe Lazzarini, the UN humanitarian chief for Somalia.

Lazzarini made his remarks to Newsweek, which devoted three brief paragraphs to the crisis this week. Yet even this tiny whisper was like a gargantuan roar compared to the coverage in the rest of the American media and political establishments. The vast suffering inflicted on Somalia in America's name is virtually invisible in the American press – and entirely ignored by the presidential candidates, who have all pledged to expand the size and reach of America's military might and to continue the Terror War.

True, there was a flurry of small stories last week, after a U.S. missile strike on a Somali village – ostensibly aimed at an alleged terrorist allegedly hiding there – killed three women and three children. But there was no editorial outrage, of course; the incident was merely noted, sometimes with no mention of the victims. The emphasis was entirely on American efforts to nail a terrorist.

For example, here is CNN's take: "A U.S. missile strike in southern Somalia on Monday targeted a man wanted by the FBI, two senior U.S. officials said Tuesday," it began – as if it were the most normal thing in the world to send a missile into a foreign town to kill an FBI suspect. It is now simply assumed without question that American leaders have the right to kill anyone they please, anywhere in the world. The concept of "extrajudicial killing" is now perfectly, openly acceptable to America's great and good– as is the notion that innocent people will be blown to bits in these assassination attempts. To its credit, CNN did finally mention the dead women and children – 13 paragraphs into the story, after first providing copious context on the unmitigated (if unproven) evil of the alleged terrorist…who, as it happens, was not even in the village.

But there were not even pro forma apologies to the families of the dead for this "mistake." These six dead Somali people – like the six thousand killed in the American-Ethiopian "regime change" – mean nothing. The only thing that really matters is the display of American power, the stamp of domination.